How to Play

The core loop: pick a country, write orders in plain English, skip time, and read what the world did in response.

Open Historia works differently from most strategy games. There is no build queue, no research tree and no clock ticking down. You have one country, a world full of countries that a language model plays, and a button that advances time.

The loop

1. Look at the world. Click countries to read them. Ask your advisor what it thinks.
2. Write down what you intend to do. Orders go in the actions queue, in plain English.
3. Talk to people. Open a chat with any country and negotiate, threaten, or ask questions.
4. Skip time. Choose how far — six hours, a month, a year.
5. Read what happened. The world hands you back a set of events, arriving as the model writes them and revealed one at a time, with the map changing as each one lands.

Then you do it again. That is the whole game. Everything else is detail.

The important thing to internalise is that step 4 is where the game happens. Steps 1–3 are you preparing; nothing moves until you skip time. If you sit and stare at the map, the world sits and stares back.

Your first ten minutes

Pick Modern Day — it is the built-in scenario and the most polished. Choose a country you know something about; you will write better orders for a country whose situation you can picture. Medium difficulty.

Then, before you do anything else:

• Open the advisor (bottom-right corner) and ask "what should I be worried about?" It reads your actual position and answers about it.
• Click a neighbour on the map, then ⓘ for its panel. Ask for the advisor's report.
• Open a chat with someone and say something. They will answer in their leader's voice.

Now write one order — something modest, like "begin talks with France about a trade agreement" — and skip forward one month. Read the events. That is the game.

Writing orders that work

Orders are free text, and the model reads them as instructions from your head of state. The difference between a good and a bad turn is usually the order, not the dice.

Be specific about what and where. "Move troops" gives the world nothing to work with. "Reinforce the eastern border with two infantry divisions and put the air force on alert" gives it a great deal.

Say why, when it matters. "Raise tariffs on Chinese steel to protect domestic mills" produces a different chain of consequences than "raise tariffs".

Ask for things that take time. A single month will not industrialise a country. Orders that span turns get carried forward and referred back to.

Set a standing goal. Orders are what your government does this turn; the standing goal field at the top of the Actions panel is the direction behind them — "keep out of the war and grow the economy", "unify Italy by 1870". Your ministers handle whatever your orders did not cover in its spirit, and your advisor weighs its advice against it. It never creates an action you did not order, and no other country knows it.

Don't write fiction. You are giving orders, not narrating outcomes. "Our army crushes theirs and takes the capital" is not an order — it is you trying to write the event. Say "launch an offensive toward the capital" and let the world decide how it goes.

Choosing how far to skip

There is also Auto-jump, which lets the model choose the distance — it skips to the next moment it thinks you would want to be present for.

Longer skips are not free: the world has to compress more into the same number of events, so detail is lost. If something important is in motion, take smaller steps.

Reading the results

The Events panel opens as soon as the skip starts and fills as the model writes, with the time panel saying what the skip is doing ("Writing 1 month of events…"). Events are revealed one at a time: each one's changes are applied to the map as you step to it — so you see the border move, the unit appear, the government fall. The camera follows, and each card has chips for the countries, regions and forces it is about; click one to fly there.

Use Next event to step through, or Skip to end to jump to the final state.

Saw something you would have acted on? Three events in, an ultimatum arrives — and the four events after it assume you did nothing. ✋ Intervene here stops the round at the event you are looking at: what you have seen is kept, the rest never happens, the date becomes that event's, and your next orders go out before what came next. It costs no request, and the shortened turn can still be undone.

Now and then a skip offers a moment to play out. One of its events about you — a summit, an ultimatum, a night in a bunker — carries a yellow ⚡ strip: Play it out turns it into an interactive event, played beat by beat; Let it pass leaves it as written.

You can reopen the history at any time with the « button on the date pill.

Made a mess of it?

↩ Undo last turn restores the world to how it was before the last time skip. It is right there in the time panel. The game keeps several turns of history, so you can step back more than once.

This is not cheating — it is the main way people play. A time skip is a roll of the dice as much as a decision, and rewinding a turn that went absurdly is normal.

For heavier intervention, the cheats panel lets you annex territory, edit countries, author events by hand, set standing reminders every AI is told, and switch which country you play.

What the AI is and isn't doing

The model is not an opponent trying to beat you. It is playing every other country in the world according to what those countries want, how they see you, and what has already happened. It also narrates the consequences of your own orders.

That means:

• It will not read your mind. If your intent is only in your head, it does not exist.
• It remembers. Leaders recall previous conversations; the world refers back to earlier events.
• Difficulty changes how it treats you, not what it knows. See starting a game for what the six levels actually do.

Where to go next

• Your first campaign — the same thing again, but walked through step by step with a specific country.
• The interface — what every button does.
• Giving orders — the actions queue in depth.
• Time and turns — auto-jump, cancelling, and undo.

Open Historia is under active development on two channels, and this wiki is written by hand — a page can fall behind a release. Last checked against the game on 2026-09-24 · main e62a1c55 · beta 2f48a6c2. If something here does not match what you see in the game, trust the game and say so on Discord.